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Test reveals illiteracy among school students

Dnipropetrovsk — This academic year 260 pupils of Dnipropetrovsk elementary schools have taken part in the charitable educational project Free English. The event was masterminded by the Arystokratka foreign languages club and involved teachers and senior foreign-language students who volunteered to participate. The managers of this project, which is designed to involve children from families with different levels of income, guarantee that after attending the Free English course schoolchildren will have a language command that meets the relevant standards and will be able to speak fluently on the program topics.

It is also planned to carry out the project in other cities of the region in the nearest future, above all, in Kryvy Rih and Dniprodzerzynsk. Meanwhile, according to the club director Nadia Rybka, her colleagues encountered unexpected problems. Before the studies had begun, the pupils were given a test. “Its results shocked our club’s administration,” she said. “Third-grade pupils are practically unable to properly write even in Russian and Ukrainian, let alone English. Some questionnaires the pupils were asked to fill out remained empty. For example, they wrote the phrase ‘My name is Dima’ in Russian letters and the name Kateryna with two mistakes in both Russian and Ukrainian. It turned out that the educational level in today’s schools is so low that we had to rewrite the program we had intended to use for teaching the language.”

Therefore, the club also decided to launch a free course to train senior pupils for independent testing in Ukrainian and English. “It is quite costly today to hire a private tutor – up to 100 hryvnias a lesson,” Rybka says, “and it is beyond many parents’ means. So we decided to open a free course in our club. Linguists are already training volunteers for classes. In a short while we are planning to have independent testing preparation courses not only in liberal arts but also in mathematics, as well as to open free artwork societies in the city’s schools.”

Yet, according to the club director, school principals have taken a dim view of these ideas. Only four schools in Dnipropetrovsk district have agreed to participate in the proposed projects.

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